Utilization of media resources (disk, tape drives or library media) of a backup application is a major bottleneck for performance and scalability of a backup system. Ideally, each media resource should be utilized at a 100% load. Because there are many types of backups and many types of media resources, it is difficult to obtain uniform utilization of the media resources without a great deal of experimentation by a backup administrator.
Additionally, backups must be scheduled with the business needs of a customer in mind. For example, an order processing application may not be able to maintain acceptable user response times while creating backup data during peak user periods. Therefore, the backup of the order processing application should be scheduled during non-peak user periods.